The Cohen Collection
by Clodius Pulcher
Summary: Now in Vienna there's ten pretty women... A crossover, of sorts. Aziraphale learns how to waltz, badly; Crowley takes the former Sister Mary Loquacious to see something in an abandoned gallery; and Death's had a bad day at the office.
1. Brandy and Death

**THE COHEN COLLECTION**

**~o~  
**

**A/N: **_A__ darkish shade of crack, inspired partly by possibly_thrice's delightful sketch of Aziraphale and War, partly by the story she has so often lovingly outlined but not yet written of Crowley's romance with Mary Hodges, and partly by Leonard Cohen (after Lorca). A quick glance back at my (very short) story 'Snow White and Rose Red' might not go amiss. I own neither Good Omens nor anything Leonard Cohen has ever sung, except in a strictly non-intellectual-property-related way, and I make nothing from this but my own entertainment. And possibly yours? It would be nice.  
_

**~o~**

_**~ brandy and death ~**_

_**~o~  
**_

"In 1797, a gentleman called Wolf wrote about the waltz," said Aziraphale, both loudly, because the concert hall was buzzing, and rather desperately, because it was not buzzing enough. It was hot and smoky and candles blazed overhead in an uncountable array of filigreed golden chandeliers. "His pamphlet was entitled 'Proof that Waltzing is the Main Source of Weakness of the Body and Mind of our Generation' –"

A portly gentleman swung past and glared at them. Aziraphale, attempting to avoid the gentleman's equally portly partner, tripped over his own feet. He was then obliged to swallow a yelp when an exceedingly sharp heel descended, not gently, on his toes.

"Sorry," said War, and removed it with an exquisitely judged flash of what would certainly have been an ankle, if she hadn't been wearing thigh-high stiletto boots under her crimson ball gown. Her lipstick glistened like clotted blood. "Force of habit."

Aziraphale hopped on his good foot and managed to suppress several quite inventive curses that would have surprised, for example, any demon currently engaged in tempting humans, or rather _a_ human, in a gallery not so very far away. Her hand was steady under his elbow and disconcertingly strong, the red silk of her elbow-length glove shimmering liquescent in the warm candlelight.

"Look," he said, giving up, "are you _sure_ we couldn't just have gone gavotting again –"

"Nope," said War firmly. "That was last Wednesday. And the Wednesday before that. And the one before that. _And_ –"

"Yes, all right," sighed Aziraphale.

He set his foot gingerly down on the dance floor. "All right," he said again, a little more confidently. Another couple spun past in a dazzle of sequins. "After all," he added, "we are in Vienna. I should make some effort to vary my repertoire, I suppose."

"That's right," said War. Her eyes caught the candlelight and glimmered brandy-golden. "So waltzing it is. And this time try not to fall over anything, there's a good chap."

**~o~**

The glass was bulbous, a balloon propped up on a slender stem. Liquid swirled enticingly. "Go on," the demon was saying, "just a mouthful, it's lovely," and Mary Hodges, who had never really liked brandy, was thinking wistfully: I could really do with a nice cup of tea, all this tempting-and-being-tempted business is rather hard on the old nerves...

Crowley gave up sulkily. "Oh, all right," he said. "_I'll_ have it, then."

He tossed it back, his tongue curling snakishly against the inside of the glass. Mary shuddered a little.

"You know," she said, "you don't have to tempt me into something every time we go out. It's getting repetitive."

The demon looked rather embarrassed.

"Well, no," he said. "But this way, I can put it on expenses."

"Oh," said Mary. "Right."

"And anyway, Below doesn't like us fraternising with the livestock, uh, I mean with humans, except in the way of business, uh," said Crowley hurriedly. "Uh. How do you like Vienna?"

Mary looked around.

The long gallery was lined with white pillars, all shadowed and glistening in what little moonlight crept in through the windows that stood glassless like blinded eyes. Shards glittered in the diamond frost.

She said, doubtfully, "I thought we were going waltzing."

Since she had dressed appropriately, horrible presentiments were currently assailing her concerning the effect of all this trekking through abandoned buildings on her blue ball gown's satin skirts, let alone her best pair of evening shoes. Pine needles poked through the jagged edges of one of the broken windows and a bird lay dead beneath it, folded up in its own pale feathers. Like a tail, a ghostly path dragged through the icy muck carpeting the gallery's marble floor behind them.

"Uh. Well, of course," said Crowley. "I thought you might like to see this first... uh..."

Mary looked around the frosty gallery again, pointedly.

"... of course, it was different when I was here last..."

"Of course," said Mary Hodges.

Demons! she was thinking; and also: what I _really _need right now is a nice cup of gin. Maybe a splash of tonic. A slice of lime wouldn't go amiss, either.

"... there was this picture, I think it used to be over here..."

"But that's just a window," Mary started to say, and then she turned her head, just a fraction, and in the corner of her eye, the sun came up.

She blinked and stared. This window was one of the few that was still glazed. The darkness outside was overwhelming.

"No, not like that," said Crowley beside her. "You can't look at it straight on, you have to sort of squint –"

There it was again. Blue as a winter morning, the sun dazzling on fresh snow. Just in the corner of her eye, and now it wasn't glass at all, it was –

Crowley caught her hand.

"Don't touch it," he said. "We never did work out who put it there, or why. But don't touch it. You don't know when it's been."

**~o~**

ANOTHER ONE, PLEASE.

"There y'go," said the barman, in a language that might well have been German, once upon a time. "On the house."

In this house, it always was. The angel of Death nodded gloomily and took the glass between his bony fingers.

THANK YOU, he said, and stared straight ahead for a while, until it apparently occurred to him that there was a drink on the bar in front of him. He drank it. Where it went at this point was hard to tell.

The barman poured him another glass of brandy. "Kids, eh?" he said, sympathetically.

YES, said Death, heavy as a gravestone. KIDS.

**~o~**

"– because of how close the dancers are, d'you see," Aziraphale was saying as they stumbled down the concert hall's steps. He was still flushed from the heat and the exertion and War warm against him, her hair a spill of burning silk over her burnished shoulders. They were arm-in-arm now, unsteady from liquor. "Ver' bad, dear lady. _Lewd_. Thass what it is, lewd –"

War's laughter was a chatter of rooks alighting on the battlefield.

"Sure," she said, "lewd! Tell me about it!"

"Oh, but it is," said the angel, feelingly. "It's, well, it's _ver'_ lewd – not like – not –"

"– not like the gavotte," said War. "Yeah. I guessed." She was grinning, though. "You were getting pretty good back there. Hardly trod on my feet at all."

Aziraphale brightened up. "Do you think?"

"Would I lie?"

"Well, uh –"

There was brandy on her breath and she kissed like a bonfire: hot and smoky and burning for more. The wall was cold at his back. He was kissing her red mouth and the bronze of her neck and thinking uncertainly about sobering up, because he was an angel after all, it wasn't the done thing, especially not in the street, not outside a Viennese hotel in the charcoal grey beyond a moon-drenched midnight –

War drew back, just a little.

"Hey," she said, and grinned. "Come up, why don't you? I'll show you a couple more dances I know."

Aziraphale decided he didn't need to be sober quite yet.

"Oh," he said, "well, _dancing_..."


	2. Wild on My Shoulder

**THE COHEN COLLECTION**

**~o~  
**

_**~ wild on my shoulder ~**_

**~o~**_**  
**_

Dark stairs, a dank hallway, a dim attic burnished by a wrought-iron blaze of lanterns. The curtains were open when she opened her room, so the night poured in: the cold and the brilliance of it, star-speckled, a sliver of moon floating high on the pinkish billows of a Viennese midnight. The covers were thrown back and her bed was awash with watery grey, pooling in the rumpled pillows and the creases of sand-grained sheets.

Her gown was a page torn from a glossy magazine. Aziraphale smoothed a fold uncertainly over the chair.

"Uh," he said.

He was still buoyed up on a comforting brandy-cloud, but intimations of unwisdom were beginning to creep into his mind, such as it was. This wasn't very angelic, they were saying. All this dancing and drinking and, uh, _consorting_. It had to be at least as bad as doing deals with demons. At least demons and angels were bred from the same stock. Who knew what this, um, woman-shaped personic– persofin– _person_ might be up to...

And then she turned around with the moon behind her, a silver glaze gleaming in the gloss of her hair. Her arms were wet up to her elbows. No: she was wearing her gloves still, red silk on silk skin. Her gloves and her boots and the lace of her knickers, more lace patterning her breasts.

She said, "Yeah?" and shook out her hair, and grinned.

Aziraphale tasted blood. He'd bitten right through his tongue.

"Dancing, er," he said. "Um."

War stepped over the skirts of her discarded dress.

"I'll dance with you," she said, and slid her hands up his arms, her hands warm in her gloves with the sleekness of skin, which was all he could think of just then. She was as slim as a sword-stick, as straight as a gun barrel. Her eyes burned.

He burned too, and was without words and afraid. He said, "The, uh, gavotte?"

She shook her head, still grinning. Lipstick glistened in the cracks of her lips.

"I don't, uh," he said. "I mean. We've, uh, for a while, but I don't know, well. And how this happens. I'm an angel. Drunk. But non, uh, sexualial. Technicicicologically. Uh."

Her hand was on his shoulder, her breath on his face, brandy-laced. "Sure," she said, the word a purr. "I love angels. You fight and you fight and you _fight_... you gave them to me, okay? You gave them your sword and you gave them to me, and when the humans are dead, all of them, when they've killed each other, every last one, I'll still be here, because you'll pick up the sword, angel, you'll be fighting to the end..."

Aziraphale opened his mouth to protest, and then shut it again.

"But we're good," he said weakly.

When War laughed, her teeth glinted, white as lily-tips. "Yeah," she said, "I know. Good causes are the _best_ sort. They last forever."

**~o~**

The blood in the water was unfurling like fern fronds. Famine couldn't see it, because the water was too dark under its mosaic crust of falling snow and floating ice, but a few million frozen microbes had rushed to the feast with delirious abandon and he could taste their glee. The hardest winter in a hundred years, the forecasters said, and they were right. Even the tiniest organisms were starving.

He'd been here before. Pestilence had come for the floods, at least until they'd concreted the river bed at the turn of the last century, and Famine had come with him. They'd made a good team.

He missed Pestilence, sometimes. Pollution just didn't have the old guy's _élan_.

All the same...

Snow was falling and imprinting itself on the water and disintegrating, the momentary patterns a lacelike blur cast over black depths. Famine remembered coming across Pestilence lounging in the marshes, somewhere, enthroned on a bullrush tussock with the afternoon mists rising up around him. He'd been half-sunk in brownish water and picking out pictures in the clouds. _Look, sheep..._ and Famine looked, and saw lilies blossoming on the black water, starved snow lilies vanishing at once into nothingness. He saw chains of blood untangling under the dark. He saw a reflection of hunger and smiled, thinly.

The concrete bank was iced and slippery beneath his shiny businessman's shoes. He knelt in the snow and leaned down to touch the river's surface.

Out of water and ice slid dripping white fingers, cold around his wrist.

Famine braced himself, and tugged, and a pale head broke through the thickening crust, streaming water. "Oh," said Pollution, looking around with a sort of hazy indifference, the grey of his eyes reflecting the falling snow, "it's you."

The faded blond of his hair was slick with mud and oil. He lay dreamily in the dark water, the river sluggish around him. Famine could taste blood diluted a thousand times in the droplets he brought to his mouth.

He said, "What died?"

Pollution's streaked shoulders moved in a lazy shrug. "A man... young... beautiful..."

"Yeah?"

"They fought... he threw the golf club in after..."

"Red's in town," said Famine.

The white face stared blankly up from the dark of the river. "So?"

"Nothing," said Famine. "Just saying." He almost hesitated. "We should do something together. Since we're all here. We could – go waltzing..."

He saw his answer in Pollution's unchanged blankness. He sighed in a puff of pale breath and turned away.

**~o~**

Mary Hodges was quite enjoying waltzing. She wasn't very good at it, but the demon wasn't very good at it either, so that was all right. He'd managed to find her a G&T that was mostly G, which was as it should be, and she was almost completely sure he'd gone to the trouble of buying it from the bar with actual money. It was very late now, and quiet, and the music had taken on a bluesy tone.

She rearranged the flowered silk of her scarf round her shoulders. "Crowley," she said. "Why does that picture have garlands under it?"

**~o~**

And now he was kissing her again, propped uncomfortably on the bed in the dimming dark. A swirl of snow was battering at the window and he was thinking someone should probably draw the curtains, but not very clearly, not clearly at all. The room was a scrapbook of black-and-white photos, of disjointed images torn from a world of grey shadows. Her eyelashes kissed his nose and her thigh was silky under his fingers and the edges of her nails cut the nape of his neck. His own feathers brushed his shoulders.

She'd leaned back on her hands and grinned at him. "Hey," she'd said, "come here and I'll quench _your_ flaming sword, angel..."


	3. Among the Garbage and the Flowers

**THE COHEN COLLECTION**

**~o~**

**A/N: **_For Wormwood, because she asked for it. Still basically crack, if a paler shade; still after Leonard Cohen, if a different song._**  
**

**~o~  
**

_**~ among the garbage and the flowers ~**_

**~o~**_**  
**_

"Will you look at that," said War. "Sure has changed since I was last here."

"Mph," said Aziraphale, unhappily. He was suffering.

Being an angel had its perks. The ability to wish away hangovers, for example, was a distinct benefit and Aziraphale had availed himself of it ever since his first traumatic encounter with 'this new stuff, you'll like it, I think it's some kind of fermented bread dough, whatever will they think of next' in Egypt. That morning, however, he had woken to a hazy memory of learning to waltz (badly), drinking a great deal of brandy and a pounding five-tonne-elephant-stamping-on-temples classic of its genre that unfortunately was not a memory at all. There had been stray feathers everywhere and War's ballgown lying red on the floor and Aziraphale had groaned and hung onto the hangover as a penance. It should count for something with Above, with any luck. They tended to like that sort of thing.

Now he was regretting it. He floundered miserably through the snow in the wake of War's stiletto heels and wished her voice sounded less like a knife's edge. It wasn't soothing at the best of times. He had a suspicion it would be worse if he could make out all of what she was saying.

"... not much of a siege, I haven't seen a good siege in forever... good bit of street-fighting, mind... yeah, we had some fun..."

Why did it have to be so bright, wondered Aziraphale. The snowclouds had cleared and the sky was alight; there was yellow morning everywhere, brilliant on the snow and her hair and the cracked icy skin of the Danube Canal. It wasn't helping. At all.

He stumbled over a discarded bottle lying treacherous underfoot. Nearby lay chocolate wrappers and a crisp bag frozen into colourful stasis. Rubbish filled the canal as well. When the thaw came, it would bring rot with it: there was more unpleasantness than dogshit hidden beneath Vienna's winter coat. He walked through a breath of remembered violence, briefly, and almost missed his step. Under the ice he saw (or thought he saw) a shape lazily drifting in the water, like seaweed, or a pale hand.

A little way ahead, War had halted and was looking critically at something by the path. Aziraphale hurried to join her. "What is it?"

He needn't have asked. The strip of grass that ran alongside the path gave way here to a neat concrete semicircle; a bench had stood there once, but only the iron brackets that had fastened it to the ground remained. A block of flats towered menacingly behind, all boarded-up windows and only the odd ragged curtain to indicate the place was not wholly abandoned. On the wall, some local graffiti artist had sketched a woman in white and blue chalk, like a fading reflection of a pale Madonna. She still glowed clear in outline against the grey and a few wilting flowers lay strewn amid the frozen mess at her feet.

"Oh," said Aziraphale, inadequately, after a few minutes had gone past in silence and the sickening pulse of his blood in his ears got too much for him. "That's – odd."

"Yeah," said War.

Aziraphale shut his mouth again. A few more minutes passed. In the distance, workmen could be heard: they were breaking the ice for the boats to go by.

A flicker of movement overhead caught his eye. "Did you see that?" he asked.

"What?"

"Wasn't there someone at the window?" said Aziraphale uneasily. A blaze of honey-coloured light danced on the dripping icicles and filled his eyes, which were already bleary. He winced. "Up there, look, with the wooden shutters?"

War gave the window a cursory glance. "Nope," she said. "Come on, angel. No point in hanging around here."

Her perfume made Aziraphale's head swim. He shuddered, gave in to temptation (Crowley would have chalked it up to his bad influence, had he known) and wished the hangover away at last. This was a tremendous relief. All the same, when he looked back up at the window, it stood empty and still far overhead. There was no one there. No one that he could see, anyway.

War was already at the bend of the path. He caught up with her before she could set foot on the bridge. "I was thinking," he said, "dear lady, we should, uh, this would be a good time to talk about, uh, where this is, where we're going..."

"Really?" said War, with apparent interest. "Seemed obvious to me."

Aziraphale was taken aback. "Uh, if I might just –"

The morning light streaked her copper hair like fire. "Sure," she said and widened her scarlet mouth in a way that was more predatory than humorous. "We've done Vienna. Now let's take Berlin."


End file.
